Computer-based social networks such as FACEBOOK, GOOGLE+, PING, or LINKEDIN provide opportunities for individuals to maintain, nurture, and develop relationships with friends or business contacts. These networks typically enable their participants to view profiles of other participants, and to link with other participants with whom a pre-existing actual relationship exists or with whom an actual social or business relationship is desired. Typically, once linked together through a computer-based social network, participants can exchange communications, photographs, or other media content, and can view the identities of persons with whom the other participant has relationships through the social relationship network.
Social networks can be represented by a graph structure wherein nodes are individuals or other entities and links (potentially weighted) represent connections between the parties. It has been assumed in modern large social networks such as FACEBOOK, GOOGLE+, PING and LINKEDIN that the network itself is owned by the major providers. Many of the rights, however, are owned by the constituent members of the social network (some of these ownership rights of the user are actually specified in “terms of service”).
Graph inference is a technology that determines graph content through observations and logical inference. The technology is to determine overall graph structure from partial information. Social networks contain more state information (such as photos, multimedia, games, privacy information, blocking of individuals) than the standard definition of a social graph, and edge weightings of the graph may be implied to designate link quality information, as is detailed in Serena, “Relationship Networks Having Link Quality Metrics with inference and Concomitant Digital Value Exchange,” U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/177,856, filed Jul. 7, 2011, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference. Furthermore, individuals have a view of the world via social networks that does not contain all links but contains a view of connectedness, including degrees of separation to neighbors in the graph structure (for example, suggested friends lists can be used as a basis for garnering information about the social graph).